Study on Orgasms and Unwanted Sex Show Rape Culture Is Alive and Well

A new study underscores the trickle-down effects of rape culture and the way it impacts not only how women describe unwanted sexual encounters, but how they behave during them, too.

Canadian researchers interviewed 15 women between the ages of 19 and 28 about faking sexual pleasure for the study. While the interviewees were told that they were to talk about these experiences in the context of consensual sex, all of the participants ended up talking about ways they pretended to enjoy — and even pretended to orgasm — during sex that the researchers said easily could be classified as rape, even if that wasn’t how the interviewees classified it. Some study participants even said that they faked orgasm to find a way out of a sexual experience they didn’t want. The findings were presented last week at the British Psychological Society’s Psychology of Women annual conference.

These findings are no doubt disheartening, as nonconsensual sex is never OK, no matter the circumstances. They are just further proof of the importance of trusting survivors of sexual assault — just because the aggressor in a sexual assault reports that the victim was “enjoying” the experience, doesn’t mean that the encounter wasn’t nonconsensual. The study also shows how very important it is to continue to teach — and invest more time and energy and resources into teaching — consent. A recent survey by Planned Parenthood found that there are widely divergent views on what constitutes consent — and what behaviors display the affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement that mean true consent for sexual activity. The survey also found that men and women held widely differing attitudes about consent, too. Significantly, 75% of all those surveyed said that they think middle school sex education should teach how to ask for consent; another 74% said sex ed should teach about how to give consent, 93% said it should teach how to say no to sex, and 82% said it should teach how to recognize whether your partner is giving consent. Only 21% of those polled said they were taught how to ask for consent in their high school sex ed program.

Teaching consent from sexual maturity is a crucial step in dismantling rape culture — and ensuring that rape and sexual assault can be labeled as such by survivors afterward, and not asking them to excuse away nonconsensual sexual activity as “bad sex” as so many participants in the Canadian study unfortunately did. In the meantime, though, we all can help by trusting survivors and their instincts when it comes to doing what they need to do to survive.